The presently disclosed subject matter relates to a medical alarm system and medical alarm indicator for notifying of alarm information of a patient.
An alarm apparatus has been developed which measures biological information of a patient, which, when an abnormality occurs in the biological information, causes a bedside monitor to generate an alarm signal, and which, based on the alarm signal, outputs an alarm sound to inform of the abnormality. When an alarm sound is generated, a medical person knows that an abnormality occurs, and rushes to the patient to perform a treatment for the abnormality.
A medical person is often in charge of a plurality of patients. Therefore, there may arise a case where alarm sounds are output from a plurality of patients at overlapping timings. In such a case, there occur disadvantages such as that notifications by making a single alarm sound cause the sounds to overlap with each other to be hardly heard, and that the levels of the alarm sounds are suppressed by an operation of, for example, reducing the sound volume, and the alarms fail to be noticed. In the case where only audible notifications are performed, a situation may occur where the medical person cannot promptly determine which one of treatments each corresponding to the alarm sounds should be preferentially performed. Moreover, an inefficient situation may occur where two or more medical persons rush in response to the same alarm sound, i.e., to the identical patient.
To comply with this, JP-A-2011-041769 discloses a biological information monitoring system in which, in order to prevent a situation such as where an alarm is not noticed from occurring, and to ensure safety, alarms are performed by using different independent sounds or displays.
In the biological information monitoring system disclosed in JP-A-2011-041769, although it is possible to prevent a situation such as where an alarm is not noticed from occurring, the system is not always sufficient in view of that a medical person can promptly and efficiently perform a treatment for an alarm sound. In the biological information monitoring system disclosed in JP-A-2011-041769, a message is displayed in addition to the output of an alarm sound. However, the contents of a message are simply a notification that an alarming state occurs, and insufficient for enabling a medical person to perform a prompt and efficient treatment.